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Lot Essay
De Kooning's perpetual desire to rethink and rework compositions is well-known. It was played out nowhere more obsessively than in his seminal Woman series.
The present work is an extraordinary example of de Kooning's distinctive working method. He prefered vellum as a support for his drawings, since it had introduced a transparent layer which not only enabled the artist to develop one image by tracing another, but it also allowed multiple alterations. Because its surface is smooth and its consistency stiff, vellum could both support dense paint strokes and permit the erasure of an entire composition. As Marla Prather has noted, "De Kooning's well-known practice of tearing up drawings and placing them on the surface of a painting, working over both surface, then removing what was essentially a template, made for fortuitous pictorial splices and elision that can be likened to collage techniques." (M. Prather, "Catalogue," in Willem De Kooning: Paintings, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1994, p. 94).
As the inscription on the present piece indicates, it was given by the artist to Al Copley, painter and member of "The Club," a loft at 39 East Eighth Street between University Place and Broadway, which was, as Irving Sandler has characterized it, "the most important avant-garde artists' organization in the 1950s" (I. Sandler, "Avant-Garde Artists of Greenwich Village," in Greenwich Village: Culture and Counterculture, New Jersey, 1993, p. 323). There was close camaraderie and a supportive atmosphere among members of The Club, many of whom were the most accomplished painters of the New York School.
(fig. 1) De Kooning and Al Copley.
The present work is an extraordinary example of de Kooning's distinctive working method. He prefered vellum as a support for his drawings, since it had introduced a transparent layer which not only enabled the artist to develop one image by tracing another, but it also allowed multiple alterations. Because its surface is smooth and its consistency stiff, vellum could both support dense paint strokes and permit the erasure of an entire composition. As Marla Prather has noted, "De Kooning's well-known practice of tearing up drawings and placing them on the surface of a painting, working over both surface, then removing what was essentially a template, made for fortuitous pictorial splices and elision that can be likened to collage techniques." (M. Prather, "Catalogue," in Willem De Kooning: Paintings, exh. cat., Washington, D.C., 1994, p. 94).
As the inscription on the present piece indicates, it was given by the artist to Al Copley, painter and member of "The Club," a loft at 39 East Eighth Street between University Place and Broadway, which was, as Irving Sandler has characterized it, "the most important avant-garde artists' organization in the 1950s" (I. Sandler, "Avant-Garde Artists of Greenwich Village," in Greenwich Village: Culture and Counterculture, New Jersey, 1993, p. 323). There was close camaraderie and a supportive atmosphere among members of The Club, many of whom were the most accomplished painters of the New York School.
(fig. 1) De Kooning and Al Copley.